Episode notes
Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew get into the US government slapping export controls on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models, the marketing machine that made them sound world-ending, and how much of the AI hype actually holds up. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your phone is already an extension of your mind and the "Clean Talk" cleaning influencers who will happily tell you to mix two chemicals that quietly kill you, the Egyptologist on a date who proves a person is smart but people are dumb, why we throw you in jail…
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Fallthrough
Fallthrough Media · Tech & Science · English
A deep and nuanced conversational podcast focused on technology, software, and computing.
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E81 · 25 Jul 2026 · 53 min
I, Builder
Kris and Matt have a pretty big question they're trying to answer this week: in the age of AI, what does it actually mean to build something? We start (for real this time!) with the "SDKs are dead" discourse, and whether you still need one when you can just wrap the HTTP calls yourself. Kris then jumps the conversation to Beej's article on what it means to "make" or "build" a thing, he argues that we already lived through this during the analog-to-digital shift in music, photography, and video. Matt adds his own perspective from when he remodeled his kitchen. The duo doesn't stop with just…
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E80 · 18 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
Everything Agentic All at Once
Another week, another deep episode! Kris and Matthew are back and this one goes right off the rails in the best way. What was supposed to be a rundown of the new model landscape turns into a wide-ranging conversation about what AI coding agents actually mean for the people who write software. Matt brings a real dilemma: he had an LLM generate a working program and could not decide whether he still needed to read the code. That kicks off Kris's case for separating validation (did you build the right thing?) from verification (did you build the thing right?), an assertion that we already trust…
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E79 · 11 Jul 2026 · 59 min
Landlord of the Rings
Kris and Matthew are back for a duo episode, and Kris has a hot take: ownership is terrible. What starts as a conversation about AI subscriptions versus API pricing turns into a wide-ranging discussion about what we actually gain by owning things, from Photoshop to your own compute to your house. Along the way, Kris and Matthew dig into why enterprises are drifting toward per-token pricing, why AMP's headless "own where it runs, rent the model" approach feels like the future, and why a number like "Meta spent 71 trillion tokens" tells you almost nothing about what got built. They also take…
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E78 · 4 Jul 2026 · 1 hr
Under Pressure
On this week's episode, Kris and Matthew have a topic: tension. Not the bad kind you learn to avoid, but the productive kind that, like a code smell, is worth stopping to examine. They discuss the challenges of APIs and stability, whether SDKs are actually necessary, and as always a little bit of life advice for our wonderful viewers/listeners. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Kris's deep dive on why it's actually called soccer (and the perfect apple-versus-fruit comeback for every European), his love letter to Gerrit and patch-based review, Matthew on why the…
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E77 · 27 Jun 2026 · 27 min
The Spy Who Banned Me
It's Fallthrough time! In this episode, Kris, Matthew, and Steve get into the time Steve pointed Anthropic's Fable at a side project he hadn't touched since January and watched it shepherd 95 pull requests in three days, the US government export banning Fable and its sibling Mythos, the insanity of Mythos popping a national security agency's boxes in a matter of hours, and why a software engineer that runs 24/7 for anyone with an account is exactly the kind of thing governments get nervous about. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your AI agents should…
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E75 · 13 Jun 2026 · 48 min
Shall We Play A Game?
Matt and Kris welcome Fernando Duran, the creator of SAD Servers, the site that drops you onto a broken Linux box over SSH with a timer running and dares you to fix it. They go through what SAD Servers is, the spite-fueled interview story that started it all, how companies use it to hire, and the surprisingly lean infrastructure (plus the tiny Go "checker") that makes the whole thing work. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes why technical interviews are broken and the spite that turned one into a business, taking the number two spot on Hacker News without toppling…
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E74 · 6 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 28 min
Pull the (AI) Lever, Kronk!
Matt and Kris welcome back Bill Kennedy who's been working on Kronk, AI tooling in Go. They go through what Kronk (and it's dependent library Yzma) is, the power of running models locally, and how they see coding agents and LLMs shaping the future of the industry. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes the message-caching trick that turns seconds into thirty milliseconds, why hybrid models quietly wreck the KV cache, Bill's "thirty billion knobs" explainer for dense versus mixture-of-experts models, why demo day is destroying engineering teams, and the…
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E73 · 30 May 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
Dependencies All The Way Down
Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew discuss a personal realization about what AI actually unlocks, their workflow philosophies, local models, a recent hot take from Mitchell Hashimoto, and a thought experiment that would break the NPM ecosystem overnight. Like the previous episode (a pseudo part 1), this episode returns to one question: are you moving in a direction, or just moving fast? Kris argues AI has lifted his coding domain ceiling entirely, while Matthew brings some nuance to the "just submit to the LLM, you're an architect now" take. The duo then…
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E72 · 23 May 2026 · 33 min
Terminal Velocity
Has AI eaten all of tech? Is 600 billion tokens too many use in a single month? On this week's episode Matt joins Kris to talk about some of the current news in the tech industry. From OpenClaw's maintainer burning through $1.3 million worth of tokens to why we need more epistemic markers, to the rather absurd $725 billion that big tech plans to spend on AI CapEx this year. And of course, there are layoffs coming as well. Support content? We've got a whole bunch of that! This week that includes a ZFS war story where a thousand-fold write amplification bug stalls every file write, the case…
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E71 · 16 May 2026 · 1 hr 26 min
He Who Controls the Source
This week we've got Kris and Jamie! They open with the Shai-Hulud worm chewing through the npm supply chain and close on the messy economics of who actually pays for open source labor. And there's plenty of great stuff in between: GitHub's everything-platform creep, the case for LLMs as a way out of dependency hell, and the forge alternatives finally maturing into real options. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes an expansion on Kris's "pull requests as original sin" theory, the everything-platform rant that compares GitHub to Meta Business Suite, a monologue on…
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